


Before the Bridges Burn

by endae



Series: Before the Bridges Burn [1]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Angst, Canon Divergence - Dipper and Mabel vs. the Future, Canon Divergence - Weirdmageddon, Demon Deals, Dreamscapes, Gen, Sibling Love, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-02
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2019-03-04 03:12:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13355292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endae/pseuds/endae
Summary: Canon Divergence directly from the end of DAMVTF. After the town plunges into Weirdmageddon, Dipper finds Mabel unconscious in the forest and trapped in her own Dreamscape. Given a timed chance to save her, he makes a deal with Bill - one placing his own life on the line, and ultimately one that will take it if he fails.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr Link](http://endae.tumblr.com/post/131779065845/before-the-bridges-burn-part-i)
> 
>  
> 
> This was my first multichapter! Still pretty proud of it, and pretty nostalgic looking through it again. Really happy to finally share it over here.
> 
> _Some small disclaimer on characterizations: This was written before Weird 1, so they (mostly Ford's and Bill's, just a bit of Dipper's, but I've edited them to the best of my ability) might seem...a little off mark. The overarching idea was trying to write an emotionally charged story without really knowing what was going to happen next in the show._
> 
> Anyway, enough of that. Let's roll.

The world had ended for Dipper even before the sky had ripped open above him.

His world had been dying for weeks.

It’s a nauseating thought that has him running blind into the forest, wounds neglected and apprenticeships abandoned.  Hidden behind so much, it’s a guilt that burns with such an unworldly mix of sadness and rage that he wonders how it had ever been blind to begin with.

The shrieks of the townsfolk echoed farther than those of the demons hunting them. Screams, fire, and darkness are all they know now, trapped in a wasteland they had once called home. So flawlessly married in cacophony, it’s a landscape of perfect chaos. The sky is painted with blood and laced with smoke, and it’s as close as Dipper imagines they’d ever get to a hell on earth. He knows better than that now.

Hell isn’t a place. It’s a feeling.

It’s the feeling of a worn out birthday sweater housing a body that’s too cold for closure. It’s having to hold her limp body against his own, her breaths drawn out for far longer than they should. It’s contemplating the idea of never seeing googly eyes glued to her chin for a second time, and never seeing her real ones ever again.

But he still shakes her. Cradling her close, he shakes her again and again and again.

“Mabel!” he cries, “Mabel! Sis, you’ve got to wake up!”

She isn’t sleeping. She can’t be. For as heavy a one that she is, Mabel never slept through the sound of distress in his voice. She’s too still to be resting. Too lifeless. But her heartbeat is still there, a testament that not all was lost in a place where they’d lost nearly everything.

Whatever attention Mabel hasn’t stolen, the remnants beside her have – shards of glass, the corpse of a promise that would keep the world safe. The rift lies beside her all but shattered, its once buoyant galaxies now black sludge staining the earth. Dipper flicks his eyes to it for mere seconds before they’re darting away again, the sickening churn in his stomach when he can’t shake how much it looks like coagulated blood.

Behind him, Ford still hasn’t moved an inch.

Hasn’t spoken, hasn’t helped, and Dipper’s thoughts are still too frayed to rationalize anything about it. He’s done this for missions and threats. But this isn’t some enemy. It’s his niece. It’s _Mabel._

The composure he fronted in the face of the security bot has been all but abandoned at this point, the sound of him screaming her name still ringing too deeply in his ears. Fatigue forgotten, he’d bolted to her crumpled figure the moment he realizes what’s happened.

In the wake of his pending meltdown, Ford remains as still as they had in the UFO only hours ago, a stone's throw away behind him. Maybe in shock.

Maybe masking his fear, Dipper thinks, if he has any at all.

It does nothing to temper the growing panic.

When he falls apart at Mabel’s side, everything else does too. Suddenly, the supernatural isn’t his world anymore, and he scarcely wonders if it ever had been. All it took was the sight of her motionless against the grass to shed the mysteries he had shamelessly called his life. To embrace it for what it really was.

His world truly was dying this time, with every slowing breath she took.

“Mabel, _please!_ ”

With every moment she didn’t stir.

For every second her eyes don’t open, Dipper feels the anguish creep further and further into his heart. This is his fault. _This is all his fault_ , he thinks, that he wasn’t here. He couldn’t protect her. It’s a mantra that fills him with such a profound sense of numbness that he has to convince himself that he isn’t dreaming.

And he can’t be. Not when the agony felt so painfully real.

The hand he has draped over to grip her shoulder loses its vigor, trailing down to take up her hand instead. As a last act of hope, he threads his fingers through hers, gently squeezing her for some sign of life. 

Dipper feels a piece of him break a little more when she doesn’t squeeze back.

_He’s too late._

“Please wake up…” he begs, voice dropping to a whisper. Cracking at the edges, the way the rest of him was starting to. Tears fast forming in his eyes, they cling to his lashes as he buries his head in her neck. “Please, _please_ wake up…I’ll do anything…”

When the words leave his mouth, they steal his breath with them. As if triggered by his voice and his alone, howling gales rip through the forest all around them. The vicious shake of the trees sends it over the edge, and Dipper instinctively leans over to shield Mabel from its wrath.

Shadows grow over the both of them. Larger, longer, and Dipper forces his eyes shut, clinging to Mabel like a lifeline. This was it. The fall of the town as they knew it, the smoke wafting in the distance, slowly but surely making its way to them. His heart hammers in his chest, the only thing drowning out the voices in his head telling him this was the end.

As fast as it all leaves his heart pounding, it only takes one word to make it stop.

 

**_.̰̣̮̹̮̦̤̯̪ͤͭ͛.̼̳̖̬͉̟̞͐ͪ͛̀ͮͤ.̱̰̟͚͓̟͎̟̍̐A̹͕̫̱̮̭̐̽ͯ̓̄͆ͤN̜̝͇͔ͣͥY̼̖̱͙̩̟̬̘͋̈͐̍̿T̲̘̟͙̣̱̺͐̀͒̏H͚̣̮̫͑͐͋ͥ̂I͍̟͑ͯͪN̝̯̐G͚͛̄̑̌?͈̫̻̗ͯ̉͂ͅ_ **

 

The voice from his darkest dreams. The last facet to truly mark this day as a living nightmare. Demonic laughs fills the air, a thunderous reminder of how this all came to be. The silhouette of a triangle swallows them both, and it’s only when he’s got a protective grip on Mabel that he finds the courage to look up.

Bill Cipher towers above them, in all the glory of a god who’s just brought the world to its knees.

_Click._

Before an angry cry of his name, it’s the brazen cocking of gun. Without so much as a blink, Ford bolts to stance himself just a few steps next to him and his sister, weapon in hand.  Dipper dares one glance his way, and it says so much: the cold glare in his eyes is as livid as it is petrifying.

It’s a new face for him, but an old sight for Bill – despite Ford’s evident readiness to fire, he’s amused, if anything.

“Well, well, _well!_ ” he taunts, floating carefree above it all. “Looks like the Shooting Star finally fell! And what a light show she brought with her!”

It only takes a hint of his mockery for the sadness to vanish. In its place, the white-hot _rage_ burns right through him, evaporating the tears before they have a chance to fall. For all that's happened, it’s in that moment that Dipper Pines is not afraid, that he houses a fire as monstrous as the demon hovering before him.

“Bill!” he screams, fury consuming his voice. He pulls her body closer, clutching her in death grip against his chest. “What did you do to her!?”

“Whoa kid, take a chill pill!” Bill counters, holding up both hands in protest. “Why, nothing she didn’t ask for of course.”

_“Enough with the riddles!”_

Enough. _Enough_. For as protective as he was of her, the wrath coursing in his veins is too strong to keep him still. Reluctant, Dipper sets her down gingerly in the grass before rising to face him. “Tell me what’s going on _right now!_ ”

“You’re not really great at this ‘calming down’ thing, are you?” he sneers. Dipper doesn’t ease down in the slightest, teeth grit in fierce resolve. “She did me a favor, and I returned it. Since she made it too easy, I thought the least I could do was partially fulfill her wish.”

“What wish?”

“For summer to last forever!” he blurts, as if obvious.

It’s a telling sign already. Bill knows something he doesn’t.

“Sheesh kid, were you even _trying_ to pay attention?”

But his snarl falls away to that. The words echo loudly in his head when they hit him, so resoundingly clear when everything else felt so washed out and hazy. Their last moments in the attic. The pain in her voice at the bombshell he dropped on her, tears threatening to fall and ruin her scrapbook– 

_“‘I just wish summer could just last forever…’”_

“Thought maybe I’d give Shooting Star a break. Summer can’t end if she’s not awake to see it. And I’m sure the Dreamscape’s been kinder to her than you have!”

 _‘The Dreamscape...?’_ He looks back down. For as rag-doll-like as she appeared, he was still clinging to the fact that she was breathing. He felt her heartbeat. There was still life left in her, trapped in some place they couldn’t reach.

It’s a whisper under his breath, more for himself than anyone else. _“She’s there.”_

“And she will be for, oh, I don’t know…”

A timepiece materializes out of thin air. As if to mock him, Bill purposely lets it tick aloud before them. For what feels like eternity, that’s all he lets it do, relishing in the sick pleasure of watching him start to crack in the silence.

At long last, he clicks it shut.  

“Let’s just say until I’m through with her. Not too clear on how many days you fleshbags can go without sustenance. Guess we’ll find out!”

It’s at that wicked remark that it’s the closest he comes to losing all sense of self.

He’s done this before, playing the mind games, but the morbid possibilities flood his mind before he has the chance to fight them. Mabel, the very embodiment of life itself, trapped in her own head while it slowly slips away. Warm memories, wasting away with her heart and spirit…

It’s such a dark torrent of thoughts that it takes every conscious effort not to lose it then and there. Whatever’s left, searching for the words to say to make it _stop_ , to put the images out of his head before they eat him alive.  

_‘This is all your fault.’_

“But I’m getting ahead of myself,” Bill continues, pocket watch incinerating into nothingness. “We both win, this way. She has her dreams and I have mine, coming true as we speak! And to think-”

“I want to make a deal.”

And the world stops turning when he does.

Dipper doesn’t realize what he’s said until he’s said it, some thoughtless, desperate attempt to rid his mind of the gruesome implications. As if in sync, he sees Bill’s eye grow in interest, and he hears Ford’s breath catch in his throat. The tense atmosphere only lingers for a beat longer before his uncle's voice rings out behind him, discordant.

 _"Absolutely_ **_not!_ ** _"_

At least, that's what he can make out. It's overshadowed by Bill as he breaks into laughter, almost delirious. He throws up a hand in his uncle's direction, protesting, the other wiping at an imaginary tear. "Hold the phone, Fordsy, let me hear 'im out."

He directs his attention his way.

“Well _color me surprised!”_ Bill exclaims, triumphant. "'Can't really say I saw this coming, but what's a thrilling conclusion without a few plot twists?"

When he claps, a series of projections come to life all around him. Dark entities circling his hat, galaxies by his cane. Tidal waves at his feet. A chaos god in all his glory, showing him just what he's made of.

“I’ve got just about everything ready for this end-of-the-world bash except for the premium entertainment. So what’ll it be? Secrets to the universe? The power of time and space? Humor me, kid.”

The only way to make this right. Still motionless in the grass, Mabel baits his waiting answer from the corner of his vision. He has to remind himself to breathe.

“Let me into her Dreamscape. Let me find her, let me bring her back. That’s all I need.”

“That’s it?”

Dipper nods.

“No explosions?”

He holds the look, an angry glare if Bill looks hard enough. He has every intention on getting on every last nerve, right to the end. Dipper nods once more, and watches as Bill's form slumps in the air, his manifestations disintegrating alongside his enthusiasm. “How  _boring._ ”

“Then put a spin on it, I don’t care,” Dipper scorns, thoughtless. “I just want my sister.”

 “Leaving me at the wheel, are we? You really haven’t learned at all,” Bill says, a complete one-eighty from his previously apathetic tone. “Have it your way, then. I’ll make this as fool-proof as possible. Call me a sore loser, but I’m not exactly thrilled about the idea of losing my wagers. Not this far into it.”

“...What do you have left to  _lose_  Bill? Two pawns?”

_‘You’ve already won.’_

The rift. His sister. The world on a leash, no conceivable power to ever stop him.

_‘You have everything you need. I still have everything to lose.’_

It’s a sentiment that comes heavier than he imagines it would, but the amount of truth to it couldn’t be more genuine.

In a town that was never theirs, Mabel became everything. She didn’t have a choice. She'd become his closest ally. Someone to protect. His reason to smile when the world around him was adamant on taking that away from him. There was so much to her that had made everything feel a little more normal in a place where it was everything but.

Dipper never thinks he would see the day he would beg before Bill Cipher, but he also thought he’d sooner do it over his sister’s body.

But his remark provokes something, a low hum of interest that’s still giving him enough reason to hang on. It manifests as a sudden, daunting weight, feeling Bill’s stare burning into his being. When Dipper’s eyes float back up to meet his, there’s a new air to him – something inherently sadistic that hadn’t been there before.

He doesn’t need to see the grin to know it’s there.

“Alright Pine Tree, you’re in luck. I’m in a giving mood today, so I’ll play along with this deal of yours.”

 _‘Deal’_  strikes a malicious chord in him. The scars were still there from the first, after all – three marks along his arm, all fostered by the gaping one in his soul.

“As a matter of fact, deal sounds a bit too serious, don’t you think? We’re at the world’s greatest party, after all!” he muses, swooping down to float mere inches from his face. “Let’s call it a _game_ instead, shall we?”

It’s all a game to him. Gambling with lives was just a pastime to him, next to destroying them altogether.

“Rules are simple: I’ll zap you inside that dark little head of hers, and heck, I’ll even toss in a bonus! A minute head start. You have an hour in the Dreamscape to find her and bring her back. If you do, she’s yours to take.”

Simple enough then. He’ll find her. When he does, just explain to her what was going on…

“-And before we find any loopholes here,” Bill cuts in, holding up one finger, “you can’t tell her why. That’d just spoil the fun.”

….somehow without words. If it were even possible. Something cold starts clawing at him from the inside.

This…didn’t feel right.

He’s crafting this too carefully. 

Either he really was that afraid of losing or doing everything in his power to scare him, Dipper finds himself fixated on the delicate wording of the conditions. The stakes have never been this threatening. For a demon so careless in his offers, he’s too precise with the guidelines this time.

So it all came down on his winnings, didn’t it?

There’s no sense in walking into this blind, but Dipper feels the brick in his stomach at just the thought of asking.

“And…if I can’t?”

“Oh see, that’s the best part, really. Call it my ‘spin’ on things.”

And before he can comprehend it, his yellow build blares a deathly red, eye tripling in size. The same scare tactics as the night before Mabel’s show: bulging veins, pupil trembling. An unearthly, demonic growl miles from the piercing screech he knows it to be.

But it’s the words that ultimately steal the air from his lungs.

 

 ** _“Y_** ** _̌_** ** _̉_** ** _̱ͦ̎͒͘_** ** _O_** ** _̶ͯ̅͌͒͏̦͎͙_** ** _U_** ** _̖̦͍̫͈͐ͤ̎͑ͨ̿͢_** **_̗͎̫̥̻̠̗ͫ̇̓̔̿͛_** ** _D_** ** _̯͕̺̲̹͇̺̓͂̌ͫͤͪͣ̆͞͞ͅ_** ** _I_** ** _̇̔̚_** ** _̉E_** ** _̷̫͙͍͓͔̑̎͢_** ** _._** ** _͍̥̼̯̥̜ͦ͂͡ͅ_** ** _"_** ** _͌_** ** _̀_** ** _̭̞̊ͤ͘_**

 

It shakes him to his core.

 “…what…?”

Nonchalant, Bill snaps his fingers to revert to his form. The bleeding red lightening to yellow, his tone as high and lively as it was mere seconds ago.

“I think you heard me loud and clear, Pine Tree. Die,” he reiterates, running a single finger across what he assumed was supposed to mimic a neck, “as in, kick the bucket. Hasta la vista. Get the picture?”

“But _why_?”

It didn’t _add up._ One person, a  _child,_  no less, could leave any lasting damage on his plans at this point. Surely, he couldn’t have stooped that low, could he? But even when it’s a game, he’s never playing for fun, and the very real possibility of losing his life leaves him stumbling on his words.

“What good does that do for you?”

Bill seems more than delighted to answer, a flippant wave of his hand. “Look kid, the Pines family’s been a thorn in my side for years. ‘You know how maddening it is having all these wrenches thrown in my plans? Frankly, it’s a miracle I didn’t start picking you all off one by one eons ago.”

The fear is raw and paralyzing, a wave that rips clean through every shred of bravery he’s collected all summer. He feels the cold sweat begin to bead when Bill points an accusatory finger his direction, the awaiting panic to course his veins.

Dying?  _That_  was his price?

 “And let’s face it: when one of you’s out of the picture, you’ll tear each other apart on your own. Won’t even have to get my hands dirty.”

He leans on his cane, staring Dipper down.

“But of course, that’s up to _you_. The offer’s on the table.”

It’s all on him. He had to make this…he had to make it _alone_. There were too many close calls in this town to count on one hand, but this? The possibility of truly having his life stolen…

Everyone else will crumble after him.

It’s mere seconds to process it all before he’s following Bill’s eye when it darts over to Mabel, the sinister way it curls up when it reaches her. “Tick-tock, kid. Your sister isn’t getting any livelier.”

He would be the downfall of this family, if he fails. 

The pressure of Bill’s circumstances nearly crush all there is to him, a time sensitive decision too affected by his sister’s lifeless figure still torturing him with each passing second.  There are too many factors to weigh in so little time, but his attempt to try is prematurely halted.

“…Unless of course, she’s not worth it.”

_‘Stop it. Don’t listen to him.’_

He can’t.

“-which, given how you were about to abandon her,  _she really must not be!_ ”

There’s that laugh again. It reignites the anger that’s been stewing, but in the same heartbeat, it triggers whatever alarm bells in his head that have had yet to go off. There’s too many emotions mixing together at once. Too many conflicting thoughts for him to sort through. It’s his tricks, he tells himself,  _‘he’s doing this to toy with you,’_  but the guilt he’s slowly been drowning in shuts everything else out.

Mabel’s worth it.

She always has been.

It takes every bit of willpower to leave Mabel’s side, treading closer towards Bill — it takes even more to hold his balance at the sharp yank on the back of his vest.

“Dipper, _stop —_”

Nearly losing his balance, he backpedals hard into Ford’s grasp. His eyes are borderline frantic when he spins him around to face him, desperately searching his nephew’s for the smallest shred of rational thought. “You're not thinking this through clearly. What if you can't find her?”

“I’ll find her.”

Ford shakes his head, insistent. He wasn’t having any of it.

“You don’t know that.”

Ford meets him at eye level, dropping to one knee, placing a hand on either side of his shoulder. It’s in moments like these that he sees the glimpses of a man beneath the bravado. Ford’s already on his tangent before Dipper has a chance to protest it.

He doesn’t miss the way his uncle’s voice has softened. A rarity between the two of them.

“Dipper, listen to me,” he urges, a slight shake of his shoulders. “I know this is a delicate situation. Please understand that _—_ I do. But Dreamscapes can be incredibly unpredictable.”

It’s not something he hasn’t thought about. Mabel is as worldly as they come, someone bigger than herself in more reasons than just one. An ocean of ideas and feelings, a fact he’s too often reminded of when she tackles the projects that she does. Always an idea, always a purpose.

“Trust me when I say this: an hour’s not nearly enough. Not for an imagination as large as Mabel’s.”

And if she was an ocean, her Dreamscape could easily be a universe. It’s a frightening assumption, but one he was willing to chance.

Dipper’s voice is far quieter when he answers Ford again, but no less determined.

“I  _will_  find her.”

Surprise fills his features when he does. The eyebrows raised tell Dipper everything. It’s in those fragile seconds that the ice in his chest grows a little thicker. Ford doesn’t understand it.

Willing to die for your twin. Some melancholy part of him wonders if Ford ever knew what that felt like.

He hasn’t been ignorant of the bleeding tension between his uncles since the day everything changed.

“You said so yourself, Great Uncle Ford. She’s magnetizing,” he repeats, echoing Ford’s praise. Even with uneasiness toiling below the surface, Dipper smiles despite himself. “If that’s the case, it shouldn’t be that hard, should it?”

Ford doesn’t respond to that, save for a breathless sigh, stalling a moment longer to look him over. Picking apart his posture, the slouch in his shoulders. The bags beneath his eyes. Ford’s hands grow a little tighter on him. “Not like this, it won’t. You’re exhausted. Should you lose consciousness in her Dreamscape, you’ll…succumb to it that way too.”

**_“Hey Sixer, cut the chatter!”_ **

At the shrill outcry, both their eyes shoot to Bill. Almost childish, he sits airborne with his arms crossed at his base, eye squinting in irritation. “What’s the point of a game if you give away all the secrets?”

His blood runs cold, when he hears it.

When he meets his uncle’s eyes again, he sees the terror reflected back in them. The revelation drains whatever color is left in his face, suddenly too aware of the heavy weariness spreading throughout his body. Instantaneously, he feels all of it – every ache. Every sore spot. Every reminder that he _can’t do this_ , that telling himself not to fall asleep won’t keep him from doing so. Another chance of failing.

The despair in his heart is almost too great to bear. For as many fatal signs as there were, he wouldn’t back down from this now. Not for Mabel’s sake.

_‘Thisisallyour **fault** -’_

“I…can’t, Great Uncle Ford…” Dipper says, backing away from Ford’s touch. It leaves his hands hanging, frozen in the air where his shoulders were before. “We don’t have that kind of time.”

Something glazes over Ford’s eyes that he can’t fathom. Some wordless sorrow that encroaches on his aged face, painting him much older than he is. It’s in the few seconds that Dipper stares at him that he realizes what he’s seeing. A vulnerability that Stanford Pines has never let show in the short life he’s known him.

He looks at him as if he’s already died.

“Smart move, Pine Tree. So…” Bill trails off, hand igniting, reaching,  ** _“do we have a deal?”_**

At the sight of his hand consumed in blue fire, it awakens a primal fear long hidden behind the bravery he’s been riding on all summer. It’s all too familiar – red light devouring the wooden floors the same way the hellish sky did now. Ghosting at the back of his mind, the countdown of a laptop, its agonizing beeps no different from the chimes he’ll hear from his watch.

He’s done this before, extending his hand in selfish desperation.

Mabel isn’t here to save him this time.

Dipper swallows one final time, nerves overridden, briefly, by Mabel still peeking out of the corner of his vision. Like it’s the last time he’ll ever get the chance to, he tears his eyes away from the blue embers to glance at her still curled up in the grass. Still helpless. Alone.

Something inside of him shifts.

_‘I’ll find you. I promise.’_

He has to. There are no ‘what ifs’ this time. She’s needed him for weeks and this is the price to pay. With no more than a flick of his hand, he dials his stopwatch for an hour – and one minute, as a pitiful afterthought, but he’ll take all the time he can get.

With renewed confidence, he extends his own hand to grasp Bill’s.

The moment they touch, he feels it.

From the depths of wakefulness, Dipper senses the cold tendrils of the Dreamscape reach through him, entangling with his soul in haunting reunion. Like one’s reached out to snatch his neck, the suffocation comes to dilute his thoughts to fleeting notions. Ruthless torment, right down to the last seconds of consciousness.

The words never leave his mouth, but they’re the last to fade from his mind before being dragged down into the darkness.

_‘…deal…’_


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Tumblr Link](http://endae.tumblr.com/post/133509347095/before-the-bridges-burn-part-ii)

It hurts this time.

When everything shuts out, Dipper’s suddenly back to the day that they’d done the same for Stan. It was all so different. The spell he chanted brimmed with confidence. Mabel and Soos side by side, the only backup he’s ever needed. The last shreds of consciousness, merciful, the feeling of fading away into Stan’s mind like dust in the wind.

The second time around, everything is twisted. Being stolen from consciousness is more painful than he remembers. Bill rips him from the waking world as if being torn from the fabric of existence itself, his laugh echoing against the endless, endless dark.

He registers too late that he’s been falling.

Dipper doesn’t materialize softly on his backside this time — he falls hard and fast, slamming back first into the earth with a resounding _snap_ in his shoulder.

The searing pain is the first symptom that it’s all too real.

The agony that floods him is immediate and excruciating, a white hot burn that shoots through him on the impact. Relentless, it blooms from his shoulder and radiates sends shockwaves through the rest of him. He doesn’t realize he’s screaming until he’s out of breath, rolling onto his side to alleviate it.

There are wounded tears brimming his eyes, but Dipper won’t let them fall. He wasn’t about to give Bill that gratification of letting him believe that this was an accident.

He’s unconscious. None of this should feel so real, but the wishful thought does nothing to dull the throbbing ache overtaking his body. It radiates from the bone downward, so intense he swears he could pass out — but that’s a horrifying thought in itself, one that yanks him out of his mind fog before it has a chance to settle. Ford’s warning of losing consciousness looms at the back of his mind, gripping him in a new fear entirely.

Had he landed head first, it would have been game over, then and there.

Fighting back against the looming black out, Dipper manages to open his eyes just wide enough for the waiting scenery to banish the residual pain. He doesn’t have to look for more than a second before he’s clambering to his feet, breath trapped in his throat.

Bill wasn’t kidding when he said ‘dark head of hers.’

Her Dreamscape is anything but _Mabel._

From the moment he’s laid eyes on it, Dipper’s at a loss for words. There’s…there’s nothing. There’s a barren world, wide and waiting, but there’s _nothing._ No mountains made of chocolate. No landscapes inked in gel pen or stuffed animals come to life. Her mindless doodles have done more than clue him into what goes on inside her head, and this. Wasn’t it. Wasn’t good.

It’s a drastic reality from the picture he’s painted in his head, where everything is a neon color scheme and boy band tunes play on loop. There are no rainbows or music. No mythical creatures.

Her vibrant youth, missing.

Above the desolation, a thick purple haze encompasses it all. For as dense as it is, it’s still too thin to mask the disturbing barrenness of her wasteland. Where Stan’s mind is a monochrome nightmare, Mabel’s is washed in all the wrong colors. Dead browns of an earth devoid of nourishment. A dreary sky locked in an eternal twilight. Everything three shades too dark, three levels too quiet.

Bill’s given her anything but sweet dreams, and Dipper vows that he’ll make him pay for it.

It’s with passing horror that he glances his watch to find his one minute grace period already gone, ruthlessly stolen by the distressing rush of it all. Between wrestling down panic and cursing himself over lost time, he finds the balance, somewhere. Dipper cradles what he can of his injured shoulder, pressing on.

“Hang on sis, I’m coming for you…” he mumbles, breath labored. He winces harder with each step, but persists. “Give me a sign…”

He gets three that night.

The first comes at him instantly. In the distance, he sees it — an unknown building of some sort, but ultimately a place to start looking. The wastelands of her mind offer no clues for him to go off of, serving only to further fester the doubts in his own head. The Shack was just small enough for the three of them to search through, and the pressure begins to mount more and more, the realization that it’s bigger than it looks.

When Dipper’s close enough to recognize it, the dread flares a little more.

It isn’t the Shack.

It’s as decrepit as Stan’s, somehow even more so. Wilted vines, snaking up the sides of the building. Peeling paint, broken windows. Only a few bricks short of being completely in shambles, it’s a crumbling foundation still somehow supporting the weathered building. The only thing missing is the condemned tape across its entrance.  

At the crown of its destruction, the header above the door tells him all he needs to know.

A dilapidated sign reading _Piedmont High School_.

_‘What…?’_

Dipper feels his stomach churn at the sight of it, a haunted looking structure as empty as everything else. They’d never stepped foot in it school back home, but Mabel never passed up a chance to poke and prod in the car until he looked. A social paradise just waiting for them, the culmination of all of Mabel’s teenage dreams.

But then there’s this place. This _prison_. It’s all the more indicative of the last conversation they shared, overshadowed by Mabel’s frantic worry of summer’s end. He can recall her tearful exchange so clearly, the chilling way she grabbed at her own head like it was ready to fall off her shoulders.

To stare out at the scenery and try to connect the dots, it’s like looking at two different people. This is the head space of a girl who only this morning had been so wistfully predicting what the future held for both of them.

_‘Mabel, what’s going on with you…?’_

Something terrible. He knows that much, and so does Bill.

He grits his teeth. Dipper abandons the ill thoughts when he charges the steps, bursting through the double doors with renewed determination. It’s a flight or two larger than Stan’s Shack, but the interior are nearly identical: greyscale and backwards looking, floating doors leading to oblivion, crumbled steps climbing to nothingness. He doesn’t spare them more than a passing glance before he charges the first staircase remotely intact.

“Mabel!” he calls out, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Mabel! Where are you?”

His voice carries through, but nothing calls back.

Though it branded the name as a high school, there are no lockers on the walls. Just as with Stan’s, the hallways are lined with door after door, memory after memory at his disposal. Where he had felt entitled with Stan’s, the notion of spying into his own sister’s memories is slightly more daunting.

“I have to,” he convinces, reaching for the first door knob, “there’s bound to be a clue around here somewhere…”

That’s the only justification that he needs. Braving what lied on the other side, Dipper pulls open the first door.

Immediately, the relief washes over him. He doesn’t have to prepare himself for much, if at all. Her gloomy dreamscape gives him every reason to fear the worst, but the warmth beyond the doorway tells him a different story.

Within its wooden frame, it’s their house back in California. Right away, he recognizes a younger version of him, curled up against one of the arms of their living room sofa. Dipper has his knees tucked up close to him, one of the Sibling Bros novels snug in his lap. Out of sight, he hears a gentle pitter patter of a storm against the windows.

And moaning.

Where his child self doesn’t bother to look up, Dipper himself scans the edges of the door frame for the source of it. Sure enough, a younger version of Mabel comes stumbling into view, both arms wrapped over her stomach as she made her way over to the couch. She has a noticeably green complexion to match the headband she’s worn that day, but it does nothing to stop her from plopping down beside him. Even stranger, when she spins around to lie upside down with her head nearly touching the floor.

_His child self looks up when she moans again, and his focused expression doesn’t change. “Mabel?”_

_She moans again._

_“What’s wrong?”_

_She doesn’t answer him right away. Mabel closes her eyes and scrunches up her face. Dipper raises an eyebrow at her, nudging her lightly with his foot to get her to come to her senses._

_“…Did you know banana slugs aren’t made of banana?” she questions aloud. “I ate one today. I think I scared the teacher.”_

When she says it, Dipper stifles a laugh behind his hand. He remembers that day, after school in the second grade. It went over much more seriously with their parents, but he had to admit it was funny.

_His memory must agree with him, a smile spreading across his face._

_“Pfft, you dork,” he says, playfully hitting the top of her stomach with the soft cover book. His page is lost the minute he does, but it’s evident he doesn’t care. “Everyone knows that. Like how jelly fish don’t taste like jelly.”_

_It’s a stupid example, but she plays along anyway. Mabel lifts her head up slightly, her eyes glittering with interest. “…Did you eat one?”_

_“Maybe.”_

Not really. He never did get around to telling her that part, did he?

_She buys it anyway, Mabel staring at him for a hard second before her face grimaces at the thought._

_“Eww, Dipper that’s gross!”_

_“Yeah? Not as gross as a slug!”_

_On the couch, the two of them laugh like it’s the funniest thing in the world. It may just be a point of exaggeration, but Mabel wipes the joyous tears beading at her eyes — an admittedly silly looking sight while hanging upside down. Blood pools in her forehead and flushes in her face, and as interested as he is to see green and red mix, Dipper instead grabs at her arm to help pull her up, her head resting beside his hip.  He offers a small bit of comfort, messily ruffling up her hair when he pats the top of her head._

Even at seven years old, he sees it himself. Some child mindful beyond his years, always looking her direction first. Mabel’s practically healed by the gesture, already looking miles better the moment he touches her. It’s an uplifting thought, one he wishes had worked the same magic when she was emptying her stomach over the toilet for hours that night.

Her memories bring a small reprieve to the horror. As tempting as it is to stop and stare, there’s a watch ticking away the seconds, and it tears him away from the memory. There’s a lot more to sort through. Dipper pays each a pensive visit, peeking in on winter days and days long past. Birthday parties where no one showed up but not letting it steal their happiness. Piece by piece, he finds the traces of how they came to be.

Spelling bees. Kickboxing sessions. Chasing butterflies. Midnight blanket forts. The first time Mabel picked up her favorite pair of knitting needles.

A million memories living behind her doors, a million more still to make. It’s hopeful, if anything. The hallways of her mind grow warmer and lighter with each passing one.

In the midst of his lighthearted reminiscence, he begins to feel more than just the ache in his shoulder — it’s all wearing down on him too quickly. Even if it felt like days ago, the soreness from the UFO has started to make itself known. It’s more than one toll to endure, energy slowly depleting with each step. His eyes are heavy with a fatigue, so much that he has to pinch himself in the neck to purge it.

_‘Stay awake. Don’t let him win.’_

He is, but he might as well be a living a nightmare.

At its end, he descends the only staircase around, venturing deeper inside her thoughts.

At the very bottom of the landing, a new chill hits him. A brand new hallway lies waiting, but it unsettles him when his eyes finally adjust to the dark.

There’s no doors.

Shelfing the thought for the meanwhile, Dipper hastens through the stretch of the hallway. No doors. More hallway and no doors. It’s a drastic change in contrast to the warm stroll down memory lane a floor above. The atmosphere is thicker, more eerie. The walls on both sides were beginning to lose their color, pastels dimming to grays, blacks.

No doors. Nothing.

Dipper checks his watch once more, biting back on his lip. He has thirty-eight minutes.

“Mabel!” he calls out again, his voice carrying far deeper this time. It reverbs twice before dying in the shadows, and it’s too telling sign of just how much longer this one was in contrast with her sunnier moments. He hates the thought of it. “Mabel! Clap or something if you can hear me!”

Nothing. He should have expected that much.

Without another thought, Dipper walks slowly into it this time, bracing the dim colors and waning light.

Beyond her happy recollections, a world of sadness hides in the depths. All is quiet when he enters, disturbed only by the sound of his own footfall and the faint voices from the doors past the next turn. The air is frigid. Cold.  

He walks the expanse of the hall, scanning all over. Still empty. Still useless.

When he reaches its very end, he weighs the thought of turning around, of searching for another place to—

_“ —Dipper, you don’t think we’ll turn out like Stan and Ford, do you?”_

Dipper freezes. Mabel’s voice comes through too clearly, not at all muffled by the door encasing it. It’s only when he peers around the corner that he finds the reason for it — for the first time since he began, it’s a door wide open. Hesitant curiosity takes hold of him when he approaches it, opening the door just a tad wider to take in the scene in its entirety.

_He’s seated on his bed, hands folded in his lap. It’s easy to sense the discomfort, but nowhere near on the magnitude she was._

_“Wh…What do you mean?”_

_“I mean, they used to be best friends but then they got all stupid...” Mabel says, turning slowly onto her side. Her eyes are pleading. “…Can you promise me you won’t get stupid?”_

He couldn’t possibly get stupid.

Mabel meant too much to him to let something like that happen. The sheer unlikeliness of it almost seemed like a joke, a thought he did nothing more but laugh off at the improbability of it. There was nothing in the world that could tear them apart.

He couldn’t possibly get that stupid, but he cringes at his own response before it comes.

_“Not stupider than you, dumb-dumb.”_

Mabel shrinks a bit more into her bed when he does, mirroring his laugh that he only now can realize is forced. She’d been looking for a serious answer that night, and he gave her one everything but.

_“Goodnight stupid.”_

_“Goodnight, stupid…”_

His eyes are quick to desert her memory of him resting peacefully across the room. Dipper’s gaze lingers on Mabel, watching her toss and turn long after he’s drifted. She stares at the ceiling. And stares. She wraps her arms tightly around herself, but makes no effort to retrieve the blanket bunched at her feet. It’s an unsettling visual to say the least, seeing her robbed of sleep by what very well could have been his lack of a thoughtful response.

It feels invasive, watching her this way. In the back of his mind, Dipper wonders just how long it had taken her to get to sleep that night. He doesn’t have the time to stick around and find out, but he grants her the smallest peace of mind he can offer, close it shut quietly.

Dipper hangs onto the doorknob a moment longer, heart heavy.

Something…was wrong.

When Dipper’s peels his eyes from the door, he finds himself scanning its neighbors down the hall. There’s something out of place with all of them — some wide open just like this one, others opened a crack. Some missing doorknobs, others mere splinters away from falling apart altogether. There’s a handful barely visible beneath chains and padlocks covering them.  

Gut feeling can only does so much, but Dipper follows the instinct urging him to the first on the left, slightly ajar. He pulls it open all the way, and again, it’s him and her and the attic. He’s lying on his stomach in the middle of the floor, the glow of the lantern lighting the page beneath his arms. Even from far away, the intricate geometric markings set the scene before spoken word can. The dungeon plan’s he’d made for Ford.

_“You’re uh…spending a lot of time with ol’ Fordsy lately, huh?_

_“You have no idea,” Dipper answers, beaming. “I knew the Author must be cool, but he’s better than I imagined!”_

_The air surrounding them shifts the moment he lets the eager smile fall from his face. His eyes fly back to the dungeon map, rolling back onto his stomach as he sketches on it once again.“…And he doesn’t make fun of me all the time, the way you and Grunkle Stan do.”_

_“Give ‘em time!” Mabel jabs, “haha, heyo!”_

_On the floor, his eyes darken. Dipper keeps them looking away from her, grip loosening on the pencil in his hand._

_When he says nothing back her, she deflates. The flash of guilt goes unnoticed within the memory, but just as before, reads it too easily from the doorway. She rids it with a small smile, an uneasy chuckle._

_“Nah, you got me,” she jokes, retiring into her comforter. He paid her no mind beyond that, so entrenched in his own dungeon designs._

Dipper’s too keen for answers this time, watching for every detail he missed that night. So wrapped up in his games, It’s only standing and watching that he picks up on the whisper he blocked out the first time.

_“…you got me...”_

Seeing her bury herself away from him under the covers, he winces at his own dismissive nature. Granted, her incessant kidding got on his nerves, but it’s not until he’s on the outside looking in that he realizes just how cold he’d been to her.

He closes her door again, backing away from the knob the moment he can, this time.

Something was _very_ wrong.

As if on cue, the next door a few strides away opens a crack on its own, inviting. From within, he hears it. Dipper recognizes those sobs from anywhere, the kind that stirred the protective parts of his soul when Mabel needed him most. He approaches it slower than the others, opening it reluctantly.

The memory of it is one he can’t recall.

But he recognizes the Shack’s kitchen immediately, the disarray of plates and the possum still sprawled on the counter. At the heart of it, he’s met with the image of Mabel and Stan, alone together. He’s in one of the chairs with Mabel seated on one of his thighs.

Her face is red, puffy — she’s been crying.

_“He’s always spending time with Grunkle Ford now…” Mabel chokes out, penitent. She sucks up through her nose and breathes out her mouth, wiping her damp eyes in the sleeve of her sweater. Stan does nothing to interrupt her, save for the rhythmic strokes of his hand across her back. He remains as stone faced as possible, but even from the threshold, he can tell it’s breaking. Mabel had that effect on people._

_“I just wish I was his best friend again,” she says, hugging herself. “But with someone around who’s just like him, I guess that bridge has already burned, huh...?”_

Dipper flinches at her words. Best friend _again?_   How long ago had this happened?

_“Hey c’mon now, don’t beat yourself down like that,” Stan protests, patting her back. “We both know that isn’t true.”_

_“It is!”_

She bursts out, burying her face in her hands. It’s hard to watch, but he can’t find himself looking away _._

_Mabel falls apart at the seams of her own words, quivering in his lap. Stan himself looks at a loss for words, watching her self-destruct. She pulls her hands back from her face, staring them down._

_“I mean, look at me! Grunkle Ford is everything I’m not! He’s smart and nerdy and just like Dipper!”_

She hiccups.

 _“He doesn’t want to be around me anymore, Grunkle Stan. He doesn’t_ need _me…” she continues, “he’s always spending time with Grunkle Ford before he’s spending it with me.”_

Again and again, barely speaking.

_“And who could blame him, right?” she says, her voice edging on delirious, “I’m just dumb and boring, and…and….!_

Her fists curl atop her skirt, trembling.

_“For all I know, he hates me–!”_

He slams the door.

Mabel’s confession is cut sharply by the thunderous boom in its stead, wood splintering along the edges of the cracked frame. The sound echoes far louder and deeper than any memory that’s clawed itself into his head. Like a domino effect, it’s a chain reaction down the entire hall. All at once, its neighbors fall mute, every door stilling in unison with the one he’s just silenced.  He staggers backwards.

He can’t think. He can barely breathe.

“…Ma…bel…?”

He hates her. That was a genuine thought living her in head — _has_ been living in her head, for who knows how long. And what he wouldn’t give to tell her how wrong she is, that this is all some evil trick. That these were being shown for a reason. He hates this, not her. Never her.

From the corner of his eye, Dipper sees the twenty taunting him on the digital clock face.

He’s running out of time, for more reasons than just one.

He runs like his life depends on it.

When it isn’t the burn of his shoulder, it’s the one in his legs. Dipper runs with everything he’s got, because time isn’t the only thing he’s losing anymore. His strength to carry him forward, his will to see this through. His own mind in this madness her imagination had called home. They’re fleeting one by one, stealing the faith, the innocence, the last of whatever else there’s left to lose.

He charging past to escape the rest of her memories, but her Dreamscape isn’t that kind. As soon as he comes in their vicinity, they swing open for the toxic memories inside to spill out.  

One by one, they assault him — every hurt, every doubt, every moment she had ever spent feeling less than who she deserved to be.

_“Well what about me? Why can’t you trust me?”_

_“I thought I was being charming, but I guess people see me as a big joke.”_

_“You’re better than me at, like…everything. And you always rub it in my-”_

_“-getting older, there's not that many Halloweens-”_

_“-need that key so badly? I never even wanted to move out-!”_

_“-I’m obsessed? Look at you-!”_

_“-wish I could just forget about them forever-!”_

_“- not pure of heart, who am I?_

**_“I just want to be good like you!”_ **

“Stop it– ” Dipper pleads, clamping his hands over his ears. He squeezes his eyes closed tightly, running blind through her memories. “Please stop it– please, tell me what’s wrong!”

There’s a part of him that knows the answer. Some cursed, vile pit in his chest where the conviction is too strong to ignore, but he’ll be damned if he admits it. It’s there. He feels it, caged viciously between his ribs, fighting against the chains keeping it at bay.  

It isn’t him. It _can’t_ be him. Twelve years they’d lived by each other’s side, one summer of which he’d watched their relationship prosper. There was no way that could all come undone in a matter of weeks, but the very thought of that being a possibility twists him inside out.

This is a trick. It has to be, and it’s the only thought he can cling to that won’t tear him to pieces. If Bill’s taken them both captive, there’s nothing to stop him from turning them against each other. Two birds with one stone, break them both while they’re wounded without each other. Mabel’s nowhere to be found, and the weight of both her memories and her absence were quickly becoming too much to bear.

There’s no one around to listen, but the words sit heavy on his tongue with a need to get out. Begging for answers that won’t be the death of him.

“I don’t hate you…” Dipper whimpers, nails digging deeper into his skull. The smallest hope that she can hear him. “I can’t hate you, I’d never…I don’t…”

Have the capacity to do this right now. There are too many thoughts running through his head for him to filter through properly. The sadness. The guilt.  It’s all he knows now, suspended between the realms of disgust and disbelief. It feels like choking, robbing him of every breath he’s already struggling to take.

His second sign arrives as a thump against the floor.

Loud, but nowhere near as ear-splitting as his encounter with the door. He’s nearly numb when he casts his eyes in its direction. Planting himself just a few feet behind the last door in the hall, he waits for the voices. He almost can’t look.

He doesn’t need to hear more than a syllable before his heart plummets into his stomach.

_“Mabel wait! I didn’t mean it like that!”_

Dipper knows that nothing’s changed. It’s all as he remembers it, down to the pattern of his own footfall. He can’t see it unfold from his place in the hallway, but he knows she’s running for that door frame.

What he isn’t expecting is to see her burst through it.

From the threshold, everything comes to life. Dipper backpedals, sudden, the firsthand sight of Mabel’s apparition fighting claw herself out of the memory she was trapped in. She grunts and she pants, blow after blow to the the door’s rubber-like seal.

She lets out a blood curdling scream when it finally gives, a ghastly shriek that has him frozen in place as she collapses to the ground. She’s heaving when she crashes against the floor, but she’s only on her knees for a fraction of second before storming the staircase at the end of the hall.

_“–Mabel, come back!”_

Dipper phases out the sound of his own voice as he watches her run, fleeing like some wounded animal in a world that’s been to cruel to her. Her apparition never crosses gazes with him, but it doesn’t need to for him to see the tears in her eyes. The weight in her shoulders.

The pieces were falling into place, forming the very picture he was afraid of.  

There was no denying it anymore.

 _‘The reason she’s like this…’_ he thinks, lips quivering at the thought, _‘the reason she’s here, it’s….it’s– ’_

“You– you _idiot!_ ” he yells, pointing violently at his doppelganger in the threshold. He doesn’t move. He scarcely thinks he sees or hears him, but that doesn’t stop Dipper from hurling his abuses, like it’s the only reparation left for him. _“What kind of brother are you?!”_

The kind that didn’t deserve second chances.

His eyes burn when he screams at it, angry tears filling the corners of his eyes. It’s there. It’s there and it _hurts_ , the agonizing reality he’s been hiding from for too long. It’s a cold and hard truth that Mabel Pines has been suffering for weeks on end, that he’s been anything but the brother she came to Gravity Falls with.

There’s so much he wants to do — throttle him, left hook the common sense back into him. Anything to leave the wounds on his apparition and take it off his heart.

He’s nearly a shell when he shouts again. To guilt it, the accusatory finger he has jabbed at his  memory flicks over to the corridor where she’s escaped. “Look how much _you’ve been hurting her!"_

For all the rage he unleashes on it, it does nothing but sigh. There are no traces that he’s even been heard, watching his illusion rub at the spot where Mabel let him collides with the ground before closing the door, defeated.

From beyond the hallway, he hears the fading footfall down the stairs, and sprints after her.

He wasn’t making this mistake twice.

The hallways of her Dreamscape grow dimmer with every step, but it does nothing to deter him. Dipper leaps them two at a time, sometimes three, hot on her trail as she dashes through the twisted maze of corridors. He never lets the memory of her leave his sight, eyes locked firmly with every zigzag and jump she makes to lose him.

Behind her, she leaves a glowing trail in her wake. Small sparkles to help him to lead him to her. He’s never more than a few inches behind their tails, cradling them in his hands as the flicker and fade. They’re warm. She must be too.

In the midst of his pursuit, Dipper’s jolted out of it when his watch beeps. Illuminating in the dark, he was rapidly approaching the fifteen-minute mark.

Like the force of it all has started to hit him, the words come like a mantra that won’t stop haunting him.

_It’s all his fault._

And like it’s all he deserves, Dipper slaps himself hard across the face, a crack in the air of skin on skin. He has no doubt of the mark it’s going to leave, but at this point, it’s far more a punishment than it is fighting to stay awake.

When Mabel tears out of the building, he’s not far behind. Dipper knows he’s running farther and farther away from the school, but he’s never felt surer in his life.

This one’s different. She’s as translucent as the rest of them, mere memories and nothing more, but intuition tells him otherwise. She isn’t just different, there’s something wrong with this one — she _jumped_ out of a memory, running fast and blind as if the world was crashing around her. As if it already has.

The ground shakes when she touches it, a low rumble in the earth that nearly takes him off his balance. Ahead of her, the Dreamscape ruptures with it, cracks splitting through the earth. Arising from the ground, thick black branches emerging from the crevices it’s left behind. Crooked and evil-looking, they grow upwards through the haze to tower above the both of them.

Mabel slips between two of the trunks, vanishing into the artificial woods.  

 “Mabel!”

She doesn’t hear him. He even thinks he sees her run a bit faster.

Panting hard, he knows he can’t keep up with her. For every bit of progress he makes, the sharp stabbing on his left side reels him back further and further. Still screaming in his back, the pain has already started slithering down to some part of his shoulder blade that he can’t reach.

“Why can’t you talk to me? What’s wrong with you?”

His pleas aren’t working.

She’s draining him and it’s scares him beyond what he lets show. Dipper feels himself so close to failing that the very thought of it almost exhausts him more than chasing her. He can’t find it in himself to strike his own face again, settling instead for biting down hard on the skin atop his free hand.

He wants nothing more than to free her from this. Take her home. Nothing more than grab her hand and tell her everything would be okay.

Tell her she’s not alone.

Tell her he was sorry.

“Mabel _please!_ ” he begs, voice edging on desperate. It’s cracking like the rest of him is, running on fumes ready to give out, “I’m your brother!”

_(thisisallyourfault)_

_“Let me help you!”_

Something in it reaches her.

Whatever it is, it stops her dead in her tracks. Dipper freezes in place when she does, even more so when she turns to face him.

He’s at odds with the voice of reason in his head, the one telling him ‘ _this isn’t Mabel.’_ He knows she isn’t.  He’s scared that she isn’t, but she was one step closer to her.

It’s the first clear image he has of her. There’s something suddenly overwhelming about the sight of her opened eyes — brown like his, but softer than normal — that he has to remind himself just to breathe. Stay cautious, stay kind. This wasn’t his sister, but she’s the closest thing he has to a breathing, conscious connection to her.

Dipper’s too engrossed by the sight of her to notice the melancholy expression across her face. The specks of light continue to stream from her skin, spiraling up and out in a million tiny paths. They’re even calming to watch. It paints her in a holier light. It’s fine. It should all be fine.

But it isn’t.

Something feels out of place when she looks at him. Dipper searches her for answers but she won’t say.

“…Mabel?”

She shakes her head.

“Hey, everything’s okay…” he starts, pained. He holds up both hands to her, surrendered. “Come on, just tell me what’s wrong, I promise I’ll help…”

Mabel shakes her head again. Again and again, tears threatening to fall from her eyes.

He’s only puzzled by her silence for a moment. Dipper never gets the chance to question her further, the words dying on his tongue when he finally notices it.

It takes Dipper too long to focus on where the specks of light sprung up from. They danced all around her in graceful harmony, but it’s only until he concentrates on the outline of her figure that he finds it fuzzy, getting more translucent by the second. He gasps aloud when it clicks with him.  

Those balls of light weren’t illuminating her. She wasn’t lighting his way.

She was _fading._

With every step she took, pieces of her were disintegrating into the air. His only trace of hope, crumbling to dust before his eyes.

She seems to know it too.

Her eyes dart between him and the high school far behind him before she turns hard on her heel and runs again. Dipper flings himself after her, and in a heartbeat he’s right behind her. _He’s so close._ The fear flicks in her eyes when she glances back, and he seizes the opening.  

Daring one last chance to fix this or lose it all.

“Mabel, stop!”

He leaps.

Time stills when he’s airborne, soaring with flailed arms, reaching. It’s no different from their first week that summer, where he’d flung himself at her to escape the falling tree’s path. His arms are wide and waiting, a gesture Dipper wishes would carry deeper beyond just trying to grab her. The relief is nearly blinding when his hands brush her sweater. The moment they make contact, everything feels whole again. Briefly.

She’s solid, for a moment.

It’s mere seconds that he has her, but the deafening stretch of silence between them is endless. The only thoughts running through his head are the ones of how he’s got her, how she’s safe, how—

_— she’s **cold** —_

It’s all he has time process.

In a heartbeat, she’s nothing but a cloud of orphaned stars against his aching chest. She’s a beam of dying light before she’s a cluster of forgotten sparkles, the last act of betrayal that this world has against him. When his vision finally clears, it’s only him holding only himself.

He’s alone again, the light of his life stolen by the shadows of her own head.

The woods of her mind are much darker and colder without the light from her illusion. The numbers of his watch are bright red and threatening, bold foreboding digits warning him twelve minutes until his demise.

“No…”

Dipper collapses backwards against one of the trees, grief pooling in his gut. He shakes his head in disbelief, bloodshot eyes staring into the distance of the world he’s been left to rot in. His hands tremble when they rise to claw at his scalp, yanking dirt crusted hairs at their roots.

“No, no, _no, no, no…”_

Sliding down the bark, he falls to the ground with a thud, the crushing blame toppling after him. Curls in on himself. He’s a breath shy of a complete nervous breakdown, the sound of his heart hammering in his ears again. His watch isn’t beeping yet, but it doesn’t need to be for him to hear it blaring in his head.

There’s still so much time to move, to go looking for her, but he _can’t._ The thoughts of impending death already have him too deep in their grasp, a terror that petrifies him where he sits. All at once it plagues him, the thought of hitting the ground cold before he finds her, glassy eyes staring out in the woods. His own pulse ceasing in the conscious world, the wounded afterthought of Grunkle Stan and Ford having to find him, find _Mabel,_ lifeless…

Then he gets it. The third sign.

There’s crying in the distance.

For as deep as the despair has him, the sound of it rips him clean from its hold. Dipper’s head whips up, eyes darting all throughout her hollow woods for its source. They offer him none, save for the black birds in the trees shrieking back at the echoed weeps. He tunes them all out to listen, closing his eyes to concentrate. So hardwired into his very existence, it’s a brotherly that pumps the blood in his veins again.

Soft, muffled sobs carried through the woods.

The kind he recognized anywhere.

As if his sister herself was pulling the strings in all this, Dipper feels some other-worldly force lift him from his spot against the tree. Like she’s grabbed ahold of his hand herself, he feels the tug of a ghost that hasn’t given up yet, leading him through the long and winding path. And he sees it, up ahead — some blessed patch of green peeking into view, and he makes a break for it with what dwindling strength he has left.

The world around him is all wrong. There’s no life or laughter. Her newborn diversion is a horror film if he’s ever lived one, complete with its own wicked looking trees and ominous birds, but none of it mattered. He’s running and it doesn’t hurt. The branches sweep down to clip at his arms and the crows screech when he gets too close, but they can’t reach him when he breaks through to the clearing.  

Beyond the twisted trees, he finds hope.

There isn’t a single ray of sunshine in the sky, but Dipper’s never felt warmer. He finds hope in the slow dying nightmare, some sacred spot in the world where the grass is flourishing and the trees can’t touch him. He’s found it simply in the fact that he’s still _alive_ , that the timer on his watch hasn’t run out yet, that there’s still a chance to make this all right.

He’s found hope, and she’s never felt more precious than in her birthday sweater.  

_“Mabel!”_


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Tumblr Link](http://endae.tumblr.com/post/138887908770/before-the-bridges-burn-part-iii%20)

“Mabel!”

He did it. He has ten minutes. Ten _whole_ minutes, and he’s found her.

The trees and shadows at the edge of his vision blur and blend and fade, because for once, there’s enough light to drown them all out. For all the horrors he’s encountered, they mean nothing faced with the one thing he’d be looking for all along. Mabel’s a beacon of hope in her dark Dreamscape, some ethereal sort of glow he didn’t think possible in such a torturous place.

When her name leaves his tongue, her head perks up. She isn’t fading this time.

Dipper’s footsteps are all but weightless when he runs to her, an incline that has his legs burning again, but it doesn’t matter. She’s here and she’s alive and she’s _Mabel,_ and everything’s going to be fine. Atop the small knoll tucked away in her woods, Mabel’s hands come undone from around herself, and more and more, he finds pieces of his heart collecting themselves back to its former serenity. 

But when she turns back to look at him, there’s no happiness. No relief. It’s a prelude to the same emptiness he’d first felt when he found her lifeless in the forest, when pieces of him were fleeting with every moment she didn’t respond.

Because when she looks at him the way she does, frantic and afraid, it’s like having his heart broken all over again.

“S-stay back!” she yells, blindly retreating. _“Stay away from me!”_

Mabel’s outcry infiltrates more than just the empty pockets of the forest – it invades every hole her memories have burned into his being. In the face of her delirium, Dipper stalls himself where he stands, halfway between the woods and the tree she’s taken shelter under. The sight of her is an appalling one to take in, someone so at the end of her rope that calling her a victim of her own mind is hardly an understatement.

The brief mental clarity grants him more than just direction. It connects the dots, how this all came to be. The realization clicks with him far too late.

“The memory…”

_‘She wasn’t running away from me. She was leading me to you.’_

The parts of her that couldn’t stand to be here anymore. The parts he resonated with all too well.

Mabel close to stumbles with every backwards step she takes, a futile effort to escape him. It isn’t long before she’s forced up against the lone tree she’d been standing under. No different from the ghost in her memory, Mabel’s as lost in her own head as he is eager to guide her home.

Cautious, he holds his arms up in surrender when he calls back to her. “Hey, hey! Mabel, it’s okay!”

“Why are you doing this to me?!” she shrieks, her voice shrill and breaking, sliding down the bark and sinking to the ground. “Now they can follow me?! How much more do you want me to suffer?!”

 _Bill._ He grits his teeth when the thought crosses him, but it’s gone in a blink. Losing his cool wouldn’t solve this. Wouldn’t get her any closer to home. Dipper wrestles down the anger burning beneath the surface, bringing his focus entirely on her. Not that he has a choice — her manic state leaves him little else to focus on.

She’s hysteric. Horrifically. Mabel grabs at her hair like she’s tempted to rip it all out, as if doing so would tear all the memories along with it. She has that frenzied sheen in her eyes again that he’d seen in the attic, but with tenfold the panic fueling it. It sends chills down his spine, watching her — spewing mantras only she can hear, rocking in place. Quivering. 

It reminds him too much of some of the journal entries he’s read.

It reminds him too much of Ford.

When it isn’t a scream, it’s a cough, a culmination of emotions that have her reeling into her sleeves.  

Dipper’s tentative when he approaches her, closing the distance between them with every cautious step. She’s stopped trying to fight him off. Trapped in place, Mabel whimpers and shrinks in on herself as if bracing an attack, and the thought lurches something in his gut.

As gently as possible, his hands cup the tops of her shoulders. He even thinks he sees her loosen up, just noticeably.

“No Mabel, it’s really me…” he says, still frozen in place, but farthest from the literal sense. She really is as warm as he remembers her. “It’s really Dipper. I’m here.”

It’s the softest his voice has been since this all began. It reaches a part of her somehow, Mabel raising her head to meet his eyes. For several seconds she only stares, eyes flicking across his face and upward a bit, presumably for the birthmark he can no longer hide without his hat.

He sees her mouth his name, but never hears her say it. It’s still enough.

The relief that sweeps through him is instantaneous, but now isn’t the time for a heartwarming reunion. Without another thought, he grabs at her hand to pull her to her feet, but never lets go of her.

Not again.

He tugs her the way he came, head nodding in the direction too. “Come on, we need to get out of here.”

Faith renewed, he turns to faces the woods again with a new-found confidence that’s already made the world of difference. The fear of running out of time, is fleeting for once so engrossed with the mission at hand that he nearly forgets that he’s wearing the watch at all.

“Maybe we can try where I first came here…” he muses, glancing their surroundings. Stan had woken up all on his own the first time, but he wasn’t about to chance waiting for the timer to end to find out. “Maybe there’s a part of your Dreamscape that has some way to get back. Or if we can figure out a way to wake you up—”

The lengthy list of options is cut short when Mabel suddenly breaks their hold of each other, stepping back and away from his touch. The absence of her hand from his stops him in his tracks, turning to look back at her. Wordless, she cradles the hand he was holding close to her chest.

“Huh? Mabel, what’s wrong?”

She’s silent, for a moment. Even she seems completely at odds of what to say, but Dipper’s pressing eyes force out of her what they can. Mabel lets out a murmur so soft spoken he nearly misses it the first time, if not for the startling resolve beneath it.

“I…I’m not going back.”

“…What?”

“…I’m not going back Dipper,” she repeats, a little more defensive.

Her response registers him, somewhere. His jaw hangs open as he stares her down, baffled.

“What do you mean ‘you’re not going back?’ We have to!” he retaliates, puzzled. “We need to help Grunkle Stan and Great Uncle Ford and stop Bill-”

Dipper reaches to grab for her shoulder instead, a quick swipe that has her backing away. She dodges his hand as it comes for her, as if doing so would reduce her to stardust the same way her memory had. Momentary shock leaves his hand hanging in the air, stunned, but he comes to his senses when his eyes zero in on the face of his watch.

He has seven whole minutes before all of it will be for nothing.

It’s the first mistake he makes, losing his composure.

“Mabel, you’re coming back!”

It comes out sounding harsher than he means it to be, but he wasn’t about to entertain the thought of leaving her behind to fester in the ill thoughts he’d just fought through to get to her.  “I know that you’re scared, but you can’t just stay here for the rest of your life!”

It doesn’t sound cruel until after the fact, when she adopts the expression she does. His words bite into her far deeper than he intends them to, and it has her shedding any sign of weakness. With a face completely unlike her own, Mabel’s bares her teeth at him, her temper flaring.

“ _Watch me!”_

 _Snap._ As if by command, Dipper hears and feels it, a tremor below his feet that has him scanning the grounds around her forest haven. At its edges, the earth quivers and cracks, deep splits dividing into fragments among shards. From the hellish crevices, more and more of the crooked trees rise, her woods growing thicker and darker with each one.

His eyes flick back her way again. “Mabel, c’mon! Snap out of it!”

“No!”

“You have to! You’re in danger here!”

“I’m never, ever going back, _ever_!”

He’s losing the fire in his own voice, feeling it trampled beneath her inability to come to terms with it all. Teetering onto desperation, he abandons all attempts to be stern with her.

“Mabel, _please —_”

Dipper reaches for her once more, voice cracking at the edges. He can really feel it now, his heart racing – no longer beating in time with his watch’s rhythm. The alarm bells in his head are gravely aware of just how much time he has left, how his composure was fleeting with every second that she didn’t budge.

“We can’t stay here! Mabel, we have to go or else I’ll-! Ugh!”

His plea is cut sharp by the flare-up in his shoulder, a sweltering ache that keeps him from saying too much. It shoots through him with an intensity that brings him to one knee, hand fumbling to alleviate the pain in his back. Dipper bites back on his lip to stomach the pain, but it’s in taking in the circumstances that it clicks with him. It wasn’t just any spontaneous flare up. I didn’t choose just now to agitate him.

_(“And before we find any loopholes here, you can’t tell her why. That’d spoil the fun, don’t you think?”)_

A breach on their pact. An electric collar to keep him quiet.

Even in her anger, he sees Mabel’s temper waver just slightly when he collapses in front of her. Masking her concern with annoyance, hissing at him the second she knows his pain isn’t grave. 

“Or else you’ll what?” she snaps, glaring him down. “You’ll leave me again? Was once not enough for you?”

It stings when she says that. Only more so by the cold expression she wears when she says it. Even as he inched dangerously closer to curling up on the ground, Mabel does nothing to rush and help him. It’s only a cruel thought until he zeroes in on the way she indecisively bounces in place, that it isn’t a conscious choice to stay put.

Taking a deep breath, he calms himself. This wasn’t the way to do this.

Dipper speaks up again, far gentler this time. “…Is this about Ford’s apprenticeship? Is that it?”

It strikes a nerve in her somewhere. For no more than a heartbeat after hearing her uncle’s name, her hands are back to clenching against her ears, closing her eyes tight. Doing whatever possible to drown him out. He grunts, rising from the ground, still clutching his shoulder.

“Mabel, don’t even think about it. It isn’t happening.”

“You’re just saying that…” she whimpers, shaking her own head from side to side. Her eyes are still shutting him out, bulging veins in her face the evidence of how hard. The ground’s shaking as violently as she is. “You’re only saying that to get us out of here…”

It isn’t working. _It isn’t working._

Panic offsetting composure, Dipper scours his thoughts for some sort of justification, Something. _Anything_ at all, but nothing comes to mind. “No I’m serious, I-!”

‘ _Why won’t you believe me?’_

Five minutes, thirty-two seconds. Five minutes, twenty-seven.

“Mabel, _look at me!_ ”

In the midst of her frenzied breakdown, she does just that. Mabel looks at him, and it’s all she can do. When her eyes are wide and searching, it’s so much easier to find the fears in them. The hurt. She’s got those lines under her eyes now, the ones he can never seem to erase from his own, hanging as a testament to just how taxing this has all been. Her face twists between too many different emotions, warring with herself with feelings she’s kept under wraps for so long. Even she doesn’t know what to feel.

“We have to go back. We have to.”

Mabel shakes her head. Again. Again. “I can’t.”

“ _Yes_ , you can. I know you can.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I believe in you,” Dipper says, wincing. The flare in his shoulder is still burning, but he can’t let it keep him quiet any longer.  “I know you, Mabel. I know you don’t really want to be here. And I know that if you had a chance to leave, you would.”

She hiccups, stepping backwards. “…s-stop it…”

“And you _do_ ,” he presses, daring another step forward. “I’m here for you. I’ll make sure you get back there – that we’ll get back there together. But you have to trust me.”

Mabel smothers her hands harder against her ears, blocking what she can of the crumbling world around her. “…you don’t…”

She isn’t listening.

Dipper sputters out what he can, a jumble of words he can’t form into rational thought. They’re muddled with all the questions left unanswered, all the emotions he hasn’t acknowledged. A mess of feelings snowballing into desperation.

“So why? Why can’t I help you?” he asks, looking up to her. Asking the hard questions the only way he knows how, with a raw plea that has to reach her somehow. Her eyes only hint at the answer, but _it isn’t enough._ Tear prick at the very back of his eyes, burning with frustration, doubt. “Why can’t you come back!?”

His voice gets weaker with each word, muffled among the crumbling earth and cracking roots. But Mabel hears him with perfectly clarity, the way it strains her face more and more. In the next heartbeat, she screams out for him and all the trees and all the birds to hear.

 _“I can’t go back, because_ **_THERE’S NOTHING LEFT FOR ME!”_**

In one moment, everything stops.

When she bellows it, the trees halt at their roots. Sickly cracks and pops ceasing in their growth. All is quiet, a deafening silence heard for miles on, so much so that Dipper even thinks he can hear the voices of her memories if he listens hard enough. It makes him painfully aware of the thundering in his own chest, the way her scream manages to freeze him deathly still, paralyzed by her shriek. By the meaning of it.

Because by the way she proclaims it, she sounds like she’s already consigned herself to death.

For eons, Mabel’s sobs are the only things filling the air. Choked, sputtered– a painful reminder of this whole nightmare, how it’s left more than just its marks on her. The tears stream down her cheeks, shaking her head in disbelief.

Halfway through her meltdown, she’s at it again, breaking into a violent fit of coughs. Trembling, her hands raise to cover her mouth, cupping over and muffling her cries.

“I c-can’t go back– if there’s nothing there…”

_(four thirty-eight. four thirty-one)_

Silence.

“What…what are you…?”

Dipper trails off without even meaning to, his train of thought so brutally derailed by her words that he can’t even bring himself to finish the thought. He doesn’t have to, thankfully, for a beat later, instinct has her reverting back to clapping her hands over her ears, listing her grievances.

“High school isn’t how it is in the movies, my friends are leaving me behind….” she murmurs. Mabel keeps her eyes locked on something that isn’t him, and it’s only another symptom of how bad it’s really gotten. “This is all wrong, all so, _so_ wrong…”

_(four eleven. four ten)_

Mabel almost mumbles so low he can’t hear her, but he doesn’t need them to see right through her. Her eyes are raw with a sadness he didn’t think she was capable of, piercing right through him every time she musters up enough courage to face him with them.

It makes him wonders, how different this all could have been if he’d saw past the disguise. 

“…I never should have let you leave this morning,” she laments, more to herself than to Dipper. “I never should have given you that walkie-talkie… _I never should have found that snow globe…”_

It makes him wonders how things could ever get his bad.

“….What…?”

As if she’d only just forgotten his presence until now, a hybrid of shock and fear flashes across Mabel’s face when he speaks up. Her eyes are wide with apprehension, but she offers no words to fill in the gaps.  

“Mabel, what-?” he takes a step closer— and by consequence, she’s taking even more steps back, and it holds him in place. He wasn’t about to lead this into an interrogation, but he wonders how to even begin to frame it like anything but given her fragile mental state. “-what did you just say?”

The answer’s resting on her tongue. He sees it. But she hesitates. Mabel’s hand bunches up some of her sweater’s loose fabric at her stomach, a crutch for her following words.

She sniffles. “The snow globe. The one in your back pack.”

The backpack he’d let consume him with terror, as he faced the forest with all his fears coming true. He slaps a hand light to the side of his head, all of it dawning. That’s right.

“Oh man, I forgot all about that…Are you okay?” Dipper asks, concern genuine. “I never told you how dangerous that thing really was.”

Mabel disregards it for something fake, the fist at her stomach growing tighter. The awaiting answer has her ready to lose herself, hyperventilating at the mere thought of it that for a moment, he fears that she’ll pass out.

But she regulates it in time, grappling down her anxieties just long enough to respond.

“I-I didn’t mean to…I just…”

“—I know that that it broke,” he cuts her off, and that small revelation seems to do more harm than good. Mabel looks as if she unravels even more when he says it, but Dipper brushes her off, shaking his head. “Don’t worry about that. It’s my fault. I should have told you.”

It does nothing. The fear is still wild in her eyes. He offers her a patient smile.

“Mabel really, I promise I’m not mad. I’m just glad you’re safe.”

“You don’t understand…” she protests, “…I did something bad, Dipper…”

His reassuring smile falls away the minute her hands do too, releasing the worn fabric to wrap her arms around herself.

“…it didn’t break. Not in the back-”

Mabel coughs again out of nowhere, but it’s different. Heavier. She’s doing that more often now, but his mind is rushing past just the possibility of her upset state doing this to her.

No, it rushes to the vague recollections he had of the surface – the forest she lay stranded real world, of the faint taste of ash in the distance. The smoke from the fires…was it building in her lungs?

Had it traveled that fast?

“-in the back pack.”

Dipper shelves the thought, reluctant. Mabel still sits with her hands twisting in her sweater. It says too much. All while she holds her silence, he’s left weighing the crumbs she’s giving him. The hesitation lining every word she speaks. It’s almost enough.

No.

No, please, _no_.

_(“She did me a favor, and I returned it. Since she made it too easy, I thought the least I could do was partially fulfill her wish.”)_

The tone of it all darkens so quickly that Mabel surrenders the answer before she lets it destroy her from the inside out.

“…Blendin promised me that if I gave it to him, he could give us more time. So I-I-I handed it to him, but it wasn’t Blendin! It was _Bill!”_

_(“What wish?”_

_“For summer to last forever! Sheesh kid, were you even trying to pay attention?”)_

No, no, no, _no, no, no._

_(“Summer can’t end if she’s not awake to see it!”)_

“I-I just handed it over, just like that…!” she bawls, throwing her hands out in front of her. Mimicking the moment she gave it up, the moment it all went to hell- “I don’t know what I was thinking! I wasn’t ready to be alone yet! Dipper, _I’m so sorry!”_

She breaks down all over again.

It’s as she stands flush against her dreary world that he realizes that there’s nothing angry in her anymore – there never was. All a façade to mask this constant state of wanting to let go. The one he’s managed to overlook since its first conception.

The revelation is as tragic as he anticipates, but he’s nowhere close to beginning to fathom the guilt Mabel’s let herself drown in.

“The world is gone…and it’s all my fault…”

Mabel collapses against the tree, sliding to the ground beneath it. She throws her head back against it, an audible crack loud enough that Dipper winces when he hears her head slam against the bark. He doesn’t have to imagine how much it hurt by the sound alone, but Mabel doesn’t even acknowledge that she’s felt it.

She’s already too numb to care.   

Defeated, she shakes her head slowly, eyes closed. “I…I can’t go back…because there’s really nothing left for me…”

They’re turning thirteen in a few days, but she cries and cries like the child she isn’t going to be anymore. Like she’s clinging to the last shreds of her childhood, like it’s him who’s the one that’s been dragging her farther and farther away from it.

Mabel weeps like something lost and needing to be found, and he thanks all the fake stars at the edges of her skies that he’s found her just in time.  Even in all of this, he’s never truly lost her. Not entirely.

For once, Dipper can’t bring himself to distract it with the timer. He’s too fixated on the way she self-destructs, watching her as she folds in on herself, crumples, collapses. There’s been something sleeping in her, an awful lot like how she was sleeping now, hiding away from the world, whatever was left of it. Only now was he truly seeing the face of it, when the damage has already been done.

This wasn’t his sister, but she was. She’s a shell of the one he’d been begging to wake up.

Then again, maybe so is he.

Dipper’s silent through it all, watching as she breaks again and again, speaking in babbles and tongues only she seems to understand. She never once looks his way, so caught up in her own emotional turmoil that she lays waste to everything around her.

He wants nothing more than to make her stop feeling whatever it is that’s hurting her so badly. The cause of it was lost to him, and maybe even to her to. Whatever sparked this all, it’s too deep for even her to recover. Lost among a hundred reasons, a thousand ill feelings, a million questions why.

Dipper outstretches his fingers towards her. Suspended her way, they reach but never touch her.

“Mabel…”

When he does, the watch on his wrist peeks into the corner of his vision, its bright display coming into focus as everything else blurs. The fierce, blaring red that’s been driving this all, marking every moment as Mabel lets it all go.

He has three whole minutes and he’s never felt number in his life.

Mabel’s radiance couldn’t save her from the darkness she’s shrouded herself in.

It didn’t happen today. It wasn’t yesterday or last week, this way she’s been suffering. Her Dreamscape is all but a testament to that, for every moment she’s felt less than what she really was, only just now coming as one giant cry for help.

He can’t undo the suffering of so long in the matter of minutes he had left. He scarcely believes he could do it in an hour.

He can’t punish her any more than he has been. Bringing her back to a world where the thought of consciousness alone was too overwhelming for her to bear. He really did let it get that bad. She really is no different than ghost he’d been chasing after.

With every tear that falls from her eyes, Dipper’s reminded of just how isolated and scared she must have been this entire last half of summer. The distressed voices from her memories replay with resounding clarity now, resurrecting the hollow feelings he’s carried this entire time. There’s enough evidence to go off it now, grimly completing the picture he was so afraid of.

It takes a heavy heart for him to finally recognize that she’s too far gone to be saved.

That they both are.

Dipper sees her Dreamscape dying all around. Knows it’s taking him with it. Mabel’s momentary carnage breaks more than just her spirit — it’s already started to sever the vibrant shades of green from her haven, ugly browns overtaking the grasses beneath their feet.

He may never find the answer, but he’s not about to leave without at least trying to make it all right. Forcing down the lurking fear, it’s all he can do.

“Hey…it’s okay…”

Lie.

Even cloaked in uncertainty, his voice carries strongly through her withering meadow. His drastic change in tone has her lifting her eyes back up to meet his as he continued to approach her. “You don’t have to come back right now. Come back when you can, okay…?”

This was breaking his heart.

But even as it did, it was beginning to mend hers back together.

“But, I know I probably won’t see you for a wh-ile…”

Dipper stutters without meaning to, a slip on his words that leave him wiping at his eye with the inside of his wrist.

Not now. Not this close to her, not while she can still see him.

“So, can we maybe, just…?”

 _‘Awkward sibling hug?’_  never makes it to the surface, so caught in his throat by the thought of it alone. Voicing it out loud would break him wide open, and he can’t afford to let himself slip that far just yet.

But the sentiment carries the same, with or without the words to say it. Dipper doesn’t have to say any more when he raises his arms for her.

Mabel’s eyes soften at the gesture. It touches her, somewhere. His heart lightens when he sees her start to rise to her feet again, wiping her face of its lingering tears. Her anxious cues die down the longer he holds his stance, enough that it pushes her to meet him halfway.

Her sleeves are dirty with her own tears and snot, but he doesn’t even pay them a thought when she closes the distance between them.

In his darkest hour, comfort is a small one, so bittersweet in the grand scheme of things.

At least next time they see each other, they’ll both truly be at peace.

When Mabel wraps her arms around him, Dipper reciprocates it in a heartbeat, hugging her as close as humanely possible. The moment he feels her entwined around him, he drops the defenses he’d so painstakingly erected. It can’t be more than a second that they’re holding he each other that he starts to tremble, the cold truth setting in. It’s as his own tears release that Mabel reaches around his back to wipe her own.

“Dipper?” she croaks, voice hoarse from her wails. “Why are you…” _(Crying? I can’t tell you, sis.)_ “…Why are you shaking?”

“I don’t know.” Lies. More and more lies, enough to bury him where he was about to fall in a matter of minutes. “I’m just…scared…”

Of what comes after this. Of how dark the realm of death really is, of whether or not you truly belong there at twelve years old.

His voice drops even lower, a whisper lost in the locks of her hair. _“I hope dying doesn’t hurt…”_

Maybe not as lost as it seems. Mabel tenses the moment he says it, a precursor to her attempts at tearing them apart so she can look at him.

He won’t let her.

“What are you talking about…?” she prods, restless. He hears the apprehension build in her voice, the one begging for an explanation she’s too afraid of to ask for directly. “What do you mean…?”

He ignores her, burrowing himself in her shoulder. Mabel is a different feeling entirely when he knows that it’s for last time. Dipper spends it trying to savor it, but can’t fight off the fleeting thoughts of just how many times he’d passed this up. All the times he’d shrugged this off as something childish, something saved and something forgotten in their younger years of life.

_‘I don’t hate you.’_

“I love you…” he chokes up, sobs seizing his body. The words sound crooked and misplaced coming from him, a thought that brings a whole torrent of others entirely. How many times has he told her that? How many times had she gone without believing it? “You…you know that right…?”

Not enough and too many, he realizes. Mabel’s at a loss for words.

“Dipper…”

_“Right?”_

He grips her tighter. He’s shaking and so is she, but the ground isn’t trembling with her this time.

Mabel’s silent for more than he can afford time for. He senses the breath caught her throat. The doubt keeping her from saying anything.

He feels it killing him faster than the watch on his wrist.

“-I need you to know that,” he insists, eyeing his watch. He has two minutes to pour it all out, and starts it with pulling himself away to look her in the eyes, hands firm on both her shoulders. “I need you to know that the journal and everything going on in this town has never _ever_ meant more to me than you have.”

Words spill out faster than he can process them, but this is it. If there’s anything worth saving left, it’s the bond he’s about to sever between them.

“I need you to know that you _are_ my best friend,” Dipper continues, recalling her memory. Those horrid things, challenging what he knew for absolute truth , “-that Great Uncle Ford could never replace you, that that bridge hasn’t burned, that _you’re lying to yourself_ …”

So many words, so little time. He empties what he can to her, a train of thought that comes so late that there’s suddenly too much to say and no genuine way to say them. Even as she watches him lay it bare, Mabel does nothing but stare at him through it all. Mild distress in her expression, and it’s the only thing keeping him from the closure he desperately needs.

With mere seconds left, the idea of slipping away without ever reaching her is more a plausibility than a passing thought – and the reality of it is tearing him apart. It leaves the numbness flooding through his veins, however much of his heart was beating anymore.

This is all his fault.

All of it.

Just shy of a minute, the weight of seemingly everything has him falling to his knees, clawing at her sweater as he collapses altogether. Mabel follows him to the ground, a surprised yelp that has her grabbing at the back of her brother’s vest, but her strength is no match for the dead weight he’s become.

She can’t hold him up anymore. No amount of pride or smarts or forgiveness will ever let him stand again, when he’s caused so much and hurt her so badly.

_This is all his fault._

Dipper grabs her not terribly unlike she has to him so many times before, with both his arms wrapped so tightly around her middle. Like she’d slip right through his fingers if he held her any less. He’s so close to breaking that the tears flow fast down his cheeks before he can stop them.

Crying isn’t something he’s used to, but he’s forgotten how much it hurts. How much it needed to hurt to feel the tears roll down his cheeks to begin with. The sobs threaten to burst out of his chest, but Dipper keeps them as quiet and restrained as his body allows. This isn’t about him.

This wasn’t about how sorry he was. It wasn’t about how crippling the fear of death was and how it reduced him to something so pitiful. It’s every memory of hers he’s relived, every regret of every time he’s fostered this dark place she’s been living in.

Mabel’s stopped asking the question. He’s stopped looking for the answers.

He only needs the forgiveness now.

“I’m sorry, Mabel. I’m so, so sorry…”

_‘-for everything, oh god, I’m sorry-’_

“Please believe that…” he begs, burying his face in her chest. From just below his ear, he hears her heart beating the way it should – the way his won’t anymore, but it means next to nothing without knowing if she will ever start living again after this.

His tone climbs a touch higher, arms curling tighter around her. “Please don’t let that be a lie…”

_‘Please don’t let me die without knowing.’_

Her silence stretches so far it hurts, like pieces of his soul are being strained along with it. Tested to see just how long he could go before it tears him apart altogether.

But then he hears it.

One blessed word. One small, breathless little whisper that manages to piece his world back together as it continued to fall apart: “Okay.”

It was okay.

Like the miracle he’d been searching for, he feels it all at once. His chest swells with the recognition, processing again and again and again, okay, _it’s okay,_ she’s okay. It’s valid and it’s worth it; she’s alive and she believes him.

“It’s okay.”

She reaffirms it, but gives more than just the words alone. Mabel has a feather light touch on his back, her hand resting just between his shoulder blades. The moment she does, it’s a tender sensation that has him wishing for all the time in the world, just even a few more seconds to feel at peace. “I forgive you, bro-bro.”

It really was okay.

Her reprieve from it all washes over him, erasing the emptiness with feeling and meaning. Mabel brings both her arms up to wrap around both of him, secure. They aren’t her suffocating trademarks, but she lifts him up slightly higher to hug against her chest. If he never feels one again, this is the closest he’ll come to it, and that’s enough too.

“Thank you…so much,” she says, sniffling. “…I love you too.”

Even with a depleting time limit, Dipper swears that Mabel stops the clock when she says that. He feels it patch up the wounded spaces between them, with a warmth that could rival the star specks her memory left for him to follow. So still, she keeps him tucked against her close with her chin resting atop his head, doing nothing but reaffirming how it’s all been worth it.

It’s a short-lived sanctuary, fading as the tunnel vision encroaches in from the edges of his vision.

He has ten whole seconds and he can’t breathe.

“It’s okay…” he echoes her, eyes slipping closed. “It’s…okay…”

It was okay. It all would be eventually.

From the edges of his fleeting consciousness, he hears it. The faintest laughter. The one he’s heard in his dreams, the one that provoked him into extending his hand in the first place. It’s grows louder with each cackle, but the beauty comes in knowing Mabel can’t hear it. He’s triumphant and ready to collect his prize, but he won’t give him the gratification of laying himself down defeated entirely.

He’d found her. He promised himself that much

Mabel would awake to a world he no longer existed in, but the belief that she would wake up at all had always been enough. Even in the looming fear of death, everything is peaceful. The last wisps of life leave him cold but not alone, a fact he’s warmly reminded of for every moment he can still feel her radiating against him.

_‘It’s going to be okay Mabel…’_

His parting gift is a gracious one, when he hears her breathe in one last time, like she’s breathing for the first time again.

_‘…everything…I promise…’_

Like she’s taking his last one.

_‘….I’m….sorry…’_

* * *

 Dipper’s always been a weight against her chest, but never one she needed lifting from.

Now seated on her knees in the middle of the forest, he’s become a weight for more than just one reason now.  Dipper holds his silence the same way she has for this whole summer, an observation that disturbs her in ways she can’t quite explain.

Without another word, he loosens his arms from around her torso, slumping against her with all the grace of a rag doll. It’s an awkward position for both of them, but the unsettling silence creeping over both of them keeps her from cracking the jokes to pass the air. Briefly.

In twelve years of sleepovers and awkward sibling hugs, she knows what her brother feels like. He’s home. He’s a bundle of sweaty and stubborn that’s never once felt unpleasant, a mix of many things that have never felt like anything but home.

But seated the way they were now, with him motionless after saying what he’s said, home suddenly felt so much farther away.

For a hard moment, the unnerving silence encompasses them both. A barrier so delicate that the quiet beeps from Dipper’s watch are all it takes to shatter it.

Something wasn’t right.

Only seconds before, he’d seemed so frantic. Practically begging on his knees for forgiveness she had no hesitations giving. For all the ill thoughts she’s been feeling these past weeks, it’s a glimpse at Dipper’s true remorse that negates every last one of them. He was sorry. He must be, if the mere thought of forgiveness alone is enough to render him limp with relief.

It’s. Too simple sounding.

Because for the lack of a better explanation, Dipper’s _cold,_ in ways that the forest isn’t. Ways it never has been, in the eternity she’s been here.

“Dipper?” she says, chuckling quietly. Doing whatever possible to temper her building panic. Mabel defaults to her humorous façade, and can’t help the nervous bubbles rising from her stomach. She pats his back good-naturedly. “Have you been watching The Duchess Approves reruns with Grunkle Stan? This is a little dramatic for you.”

Her forced laughter fills the air, but her jokes don’t suspend in it for more than a second before she realizes it’s fallen on deaf ears. It doesn’t pull a shrug out of him the way it has every time before.

Dreaded thoughts plague her.  Why there was a timer beeping, what was it he wasn’t telling her and _Dipper, why aren’t you moving? What are you hiding from me?_

He’s sleeping. He’s run through this whole place looking for her.

He has to be sleeping.

“…Dip…per…?” she says, shaking him. What starts as gentle turns into something absently panicked, an intensity that mounts with each passing second. “Come on Dip, you’re really starting to hurt my knees…”

He doesn’t move.

She scarcely thinks she can hear him breathing, but she zaps that thought from her mind before it has the chance to fester.

Dipper wouldn’t deliberately hurt her. He wouldn’t willingly hang on to her and let the rocks and gravel continue to dig themselves into her skin, even if it was supposed to be a joke. She knows him too well.

When she releases her hold of him, she finds that he has too, that he slides further and further into her lap without the support. It has her rushing back to his words, how he whispered them so softly, so fearfully-

_“-hope dying doesn’t-“_

“Dipper, this isn’t funny!”

Mabel knows her brother, and he would never break her heart.

He said so himself.

_“Dipper —!”_

He’s made her laugh so hard the she’s cried, and it’s no different this time. Whatever joke he’s playing, it has her crying to the heavens above her. The world growing darker and darker with each passing second. Either her time of waking was fast approaching her or the hyperventilation, one of them had to prove this was all just a bad dream. Because it dawns of what’s just happened.

He isn’t breathing.

He isn’t _sleeping._

When she finally does realize why he isn’t, the shock has her so far gone that the numbness steals whatever feelings she has left that aren’t physical touch. She has her brother cradled so close to her, riding off some demented idea that surely if he can hear her heartbeat, it’ll revive his too, to beat in time with hers.

Because surely that’s why he’d done that, crawling higher just to listen to it, and surely dream mechanics couldn’t quit on her now.

Something ignites the world around her, she isn’t quite sure what – the crippling fear of loneliness, the love she’s already exhausted to try and bring him back – one of them sparks the flames that lick at the dead greenery all around her.

Mabel screams as everything falls to ruin, to pieces, to ash.

**s _hooting stars sure sure are pretty when they fall_**

( _what a_ _light show s_ _̼͚̘̩͡_ _h_ _̠͉̖̜̥ͅ_ _e_ _̶̬_ _’_ _͚_ _s_ _̱̝̦ͅ_ _̥̫_ _b_ _̨̟͎̗͇ͅ_ _r_ _͇͡_ _o_ _̪̺̬͓͙_ _u_ _͙̩̞̝̠̖_ _g_ _͎_ _h_ _̢_ _t_ _̯ͅ_ _͙̭̥̝̰̤_ _w_ _̘̩͝_ _i_ _̗̱_ _t_ _̖̞̪͝ͅ_ _h_ _͓̬͈̱_ _͓_ _h_ _͙̝͇͈ͅ_ _e_ _̢̥_ _r_ _͔͍͔͇̗͓͟_ _)_ _͕̘͔͙̠̗̫_

from green to brown to red, her forest glows just like she does, with all the light of a spectacle that’s crashed and burned.

so bright, so terrible.

so beautifully destructive.

Mabel cries and cries and begs for the darkness to come and steal her too, because shooting stars weren’t made to touch the earth, because pine trees burned so much easier when they’re _dead_ —

all around her, the flames inch closer and closer. closer. everything in its path, erased. the embers consume the grounds as they come for her. thriving off the trees she’s let erupt from the earth, the grasses wilted beneath them. all a twisted sort of lantern for the hellish carnival she’s let her world become.

Mabel weeps for the world as it crumbles and cracks and fades.

“…Wake up…” she begs, fingers threaded through his hair. He doesn’t. He can’t. “… _wake up…please_ …”

as it flashes, as it turns

_“…I’ll do anything…”_

as it brightens

as it burns


End file.
